Posted on 01/16/2009 4:42:53 AM PST by TornadoAlley3
Back in the day, a good report card earned you a parental pat on the back, but now it could be money in your pocket. Experiments with cash incentives for students have been catching on in public-school districts across the country, and so has the debate over whether they are a brilliant tool for hard-to-motivate students or bribery that will destroy any chance of fostering a love of learning. Either way, a rigorous new study — one of relatively few on such pay-for-performance programs — found that the programs get results: cash incentives help low-income students stay in school and get better grades.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Congratulations on sticking with the home schooling. Hopefully you did it without have to pay Patrick Henry College any fees for looking out for your best interests.
No matter if they finish school or not. The ones who will go on welfare or sell drugs will do it regardless or whether or not they graduated. School does not matter to them at all. Money does and not having to WORK for it.
An inner city program to pay kids $100 if they learned to read seemed to work well. If students who do not know how to read, could learn, go into to principals office and read a random page of “Tom Sawyer” they would get a new $100 bill. It really seemed to work. That program worked better than all the packaged “learn to read” programs schools have bought with little success over the years. Money for accomplishment is a positive. If you learn to read—the world opens for you.
You’re pretty generous. My scale is
A’s - $3
B’s - $1
I haven’t had to deal with anything below that yet, but I think C’s would bring pretty draconian measures, depending on the class.
I only have one in public school, and he was homeschooled through 8th grade. (He’s a junior now.) (The other 5 are still homeschooled.) We have a pretty good idea of what he is capable of doing, and as long as he is putting forth a good effort, I’m OK.
I can’t see him getting less than a B with a good effort. My daughter who’s next will probably struggle more - it just takes her more time to get it. But she does have good work habits already, so she should be fine.
The one who really concerns me is my 9-yr-old - very smart, very flighty. He’s the one my mother wished on me with her “when you grow up I hope you have kids just like you.”
You are evidently doing an **excellent** job of “afterschooling”.
I noticed that you copied the first sentence of the paragraph but neglect the second and third sentences. The **entire** paragraph states:
“Personally, I am convinced that **all** academically successful children are homeschooled. If they go to school, as your child does, it is called “afterschooling”. The only thing the school is doing is sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow”
By the way, congratulations! You are a very good parent.
ping
So what if they get an A? It doesn’t mean they earned it.
I can see extortion and blackmail and threats against teachers who don’t co-operate.
“whether they are a brilliant tool for hard-to-motivate students or bribery that will destroy any chance of fostering a love of learning.”
Public education, by its very design, destroys love of learning.
As long as it the payments don’t invlove using taxpayer funds, I’m for it. After all, businessmen and employees who excel on the job get bonuses and raises.
I remember asking my dad why he rarely congratulated me for getting good grades in school. He told me that he didn’t believe in congratulating people for doing what they were supposed to do in the first place.
I can see the wisdom in that- seems like a lot of parents make a huge deal when their kids do the most mundane things correctly.
But I believe that such payment-deprivation plans should be carried out only by the parents of the kids. Any money that somebody thinks they want to spend on this should be diverted towards making parents more engaged with their kids' school work.
Congratulations on a tough job well done.
That is a beautiful story. Parents and/or individuals choosing (out of the goodness of their hearts) to reward students with payment is fine. (Btw, I think that’s a story you should send somewhere to be published, like the Chicken Soup series, for example.)
Such a plan is too open for abuse by teachers, students, administrators, politicians... There are too many courses that are graded subjectively. For example, students could be graded more on what political beliefs they hold, with higher grades going to students who share the same beliefs as the teacher.
I agree.
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